Youth health education knowledge promotion

It is by no means the thin preaching of "drink more hot water, stay up late less, and run two more steps to avoid getting sick" in the traditional understanding. It should cover the three core dimensions of physical health, mental health, and social adaptability. It must break away from the logic of top-down indoctrination and be implemented in a way that young people can hear, reach, and use.

Last month, I went to a community summer care center to work as a health promotion volunteer. I met a little boy in the second grade of junior high school hiding in the corner of the corridor crying. When I took off the mask, I saw that his cheeks were very red and there were many small pustules with exudate. After asking for a long time, he said that he was nicknamed the "Bad Face King" by his classmates because of his acne. He secretly watched short videos and bought the "Three-Day Acne Eliminator" recommended by the blogger. After using it for a week, it became worse and worse. He did not dare to tell his parents for fear of being scolded for "being beautiful all day long and not focusing on studying." In fact, this situation is really too common. We always promote "pay attention to personal hygiene and prevent myopia and obesity", but the issues that teenagers really care about, such as acne, hair loss, and confusion about the development of secondary sexual characteristics, are rarely brought to the table and explained clearly.

Regarding the scale of physical health promotion, there have always been different voices in the industry: some parents and education managers are worried that content related to sexual development and sexual protection too early will induce children to try sexual behavior prematurely, and they are more inclined to "stop there" or even avoid related content.； Survey data from front-line disease control personnel and psychological workers show that the awareness rate of sexual health knowledge among adolescents aged 12-18 is only 37%, and more than 60% of relevant knowledge comes from fragmented information on the Internet, many of which are misguided and can easily cause unnecessary harm. When I was volunteering in high school two years ago, the most ridiculous example I encountered was when a girl in the first year of high school secretly asked me if it was true that she couldn't touch cold water or wash her hair during her period, otherwise she would be infertile. Her grandmother had told her these rumors for several years. The school's physical hygiene class had never taught them seriously, and she was too embarrassed to ask her own mother.

Compared with physical health, which can be clearly stated and has clear indicators to measure, mental health education has been a "gray area" of publicity for a long time. I had a consultation for a school psychology teacher before. A boy who was a freshman in high school came and said that he had stomach pains for several days before every major exam. He went to the gastroenterology department three times for examinations. All indicators were normal. The doctor asked him to come for a psychological check-up. He said that his parents had always thought that he was "faking illness and didn't want to take the exam" and scolded him several times. It wasn't until he was taken to the hospital in a cold sweat from pain in the last exam that they finally believed that he was not faking it. There are also differences on the path of psychological publicity: many schools think that setting up a psychological consultation room and holding two psychological lectures a semester can complete the task, but front-line psychological teachers know that what is really useful is daily penetration - for example, spending ten minutes in class meetings to teach everyone how to quickly relieve anxiety, leaving more free time for everyone to play in physical education classes, and even asking a question when the teacher finds that the students are not in the right mood, are much more effective than serious lectures.

Oh, by the way, many people don’t know that in the World Health Organization’s definition of health, “good social adaptability” is one of the three core standards alongside physical and mental health, and the promotion of this area was a blind spot before. Last year when we were doing research on disease control in our district, we met a boy in the third grade of junior high school. Because a netizen he met online said that his family members were sick and needed money urgently, he transferred all the more than 2,000 New Year's money he had saved for two years. Later, he found out that he had been cheated and did not dare to tell his family. He suffered from insomnia for half a month and lost more than 20 grades in his grades before the teacher discovered it. How to deal with school bullying, how to reject other people's unreasonable demands, and how to judge the risks in social situations. These contents that seem to have nothing to do with "health" are actually indispensable parts of adolescent health education.

I have seen too many publicity activities, printing a lot of beautiful brochures, setting up a stall and distributing them, and then it is over. In fact, I have not even met the students a few times. On the contrary, the last "Health Complaint Meeting" that I and several school nurses held together was the most effective. There was no PPT or reading script, and students were allowed to go on stage to talk about their most worrying health problems: they were laughed at for having acne, lost their hair after answering questions, had stomachaches as soon as they took the exam, and were embarrassed to refuse students' requests to copy homework.

A parent used to argue with me and said, "It's useless for children to do well in their studies." I showed him the survey data from last year in our district: nearly 40% of middle school students have varying degrees of sleep problems, and nearly 20% have been depressed for more than two consecutive weeks. If these problems are not solved, learning efficiency will not improve at all, and it will easily lead to bigger problems. In the final analysis, the core of adolescent health education is never "what do I want to teach you", but "what do you need to know". Put down your airs, squat down and look at the problem from the same height as them, so that those knowledge points can really enter your mind and be effective.